Global Courant
Fortnite players are definitely here for the new throwback season. Since the release of “Fortnite OG” at the end of last week, player counts have reached new all-time highs — peaking on Saturday with 44.7 million total players, according to a tweet from the Fortnite team. Players reportedly clocked a cumulative 102 million hours of play, making it the game’s biggest day ever. With Chapter 4 Season 5, or “Fortnite OG,” Fortnite is dipping back into its Chapter 1 glory days to bring players back to the original 2018 island map, and reintroduce gear and other elements from its past.
Way to start things off with a big bang
We’re blown away by the response to #FortniteOG. Yesterday was the biggest day in Fortnite’s history with over 44.7 MILLION players jumping in and 102 MILLION hours of play.
To all Fortnite players, OG and new, THANK YOU!
— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) November 5, 2023
The season started with an update designed around Chapter 1 Season 5, and subsequent updates will pull from other phases of the game’s history. But, it’s only expected to run for about a month, and players aren’t wasting any time getting in on the battle royale action. The number of concurrent players — or those who are actively playing at the same time — has been rising all weekend, continuously breaking the previous record highs.
Within hours of the update’s release, the concurrent player count had spiked to over 3.9 million, according to trackers like Fortnite.gg. Yesterday, concurrent players peaked at over 6.1 million, and already today, there were 5.5 million players on Fortnite as of 11AM ET.
The number of concurrent plays for a single day nearly doubled on Friday, after the update was announced, from those seen earlier in the week, to hit nearly 1.5 million. Saturday logged over 1.8 million concurrent plays. It’s been years since Fortnite has seen numbers like this, but there’s no telling whether it’ll be able to keep it up.
Update, November 5 2023, 1:32PM ET: This article has been updated to include new information released by the Fortnite team after publication.
